Above Norweyan warriors grim.'
Marmion, iii. xx.
Such, too, had been the traditional custom for centuries after of the boatbuilders in the Western Highlands.
In Cromarty, then, on the 10th of October 1802, Hugh Miller was born—in a long, low-built six-roomed house of his great-grandfather, one of the last of the old buccaneers of the Spanish Main, who had thriftily invested his pieces of eight in house-property in his native place. His mother was the great-granddaughter of Donald Roy of Nigg, of whom, as a kind of Northern Peden or Cargill, traditions long lingered. In his early days, Donald had been a great club and football player in the Sunday games that had been fostered in the semi-Celtic parish by King James's Book of Sports, and which, it may be remembered, had been popular in the days of Dugald Buchanan of Rannoch at a time when the observance of the seventh day and of the King's writ never ran beyond the Pass of Killiecrankie. At the Revolution, however, Donald had become the subject of religious convictions; and when, on the death of Balfour of Nigg in 1756, an unpopular presentee, Mr. Patrick Grant, was forced upon the parish, resistance was offered. Four years before this, Gillespie of Carnock had been deposed on the motion of John Home, author of Douglas, seconded by Robertson of Gladsmuir, the subsequent historian of Charles V., for his refusal to participate in the settlement of Richardson to Inverkeithing; and when some of the presbytery, in fear of similar proceedings, had met for the induction, they found an empty church and an old man protesting that 'if they settled a man to the walls of that kirk, the blood of the parish of Nigg would be required at their hands.' For long the entire parish clung to the Church of Scotland, but never could they be induced to enter the building again, and so they perforce allied themselves to the Burgher Secession. Thus early was the non-intrusion principle made familiar to Miller, and thus early were made manifest the miserable effects of the high-handed policy which, begun in the long reign of Robertson, was destined a century later to have such disastrous results.
In early youth his father had sailed in an East Indiaman, and during the intervals of his Indian and Chinese voyages had learned to write and add to his nautical knowledge stores of general reading and information not then common among sailors. Storing up, instead of drinking, his grog-money, he drove a small trade with the natives of these countries in little articles that had excited their curiosity, and for which, hints his distinguished son, the Custom-house dues were never very punctually or rigorously paid. Pressed, however, by a man-of-war that had borne down upon the Indiaman when in a state of mutiny, after a brief experience of the stern discipline of the navy not yet tempered by the measures of reform introduced after the mutiny of the Nore, he returned when not much turned thirty to Cromarty, where his savings enabled him to buy a coasting sloop and set up house. For this the site was purchased at £400, a very considerable sum in those days, and thus his son could, even in the high franchise qualifications after the Reform Bill, exercise the right of voting for the Whig party. The kelp trade, of which we have spoken, among other things engaged the efforts of his father, who had been appointed agent in the North and Hebrides for the Leith Glass-works. Driven by a storm round Cape Wrath and through the Pentland Firth, the vessel, after striving to reach the sheltered roadstead of the Moray Firth, was forced to put in at Peterhead. On the 9th of November 1807 he set sail, but foundered with all hands, by the starting, as was believed, of a plank. During more than one hundred years the sea had been the graveyard of the family: Miller's father, grandfather, and two grand-uncles had been all drowned at sea.
At the time of his father's death the son had just by one month completed his fifth year. At that time happened the circumstance which he himself relates, and which we mention here in this place both for the interest attaching to it in the history of his own mental development, and for various subtle psychological reasons to which we shall advert later, and which cannot fail to be observed by the careful student of his works. The last letter to his wife had been written by his father from Peterhead, and on its receipt, 'the house-door, which had been left unfastened, fell open, and I was despatched from her side to shut it. I saw at the open door, within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand and arm were apparently those of a female: they bore a livid and sodden appearance; and, directly fronting me, where the body ought to have been, there was only blank transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms of the objects beyond. I commemorate the story as it lies fixed in my memory, without attempting to explain it.' In after years he would say of such mental or visual hallucinations that they were such as 'would render me a firm believer in apparitions, could I not account for them in this way, as the creatures of an imagination which had attained an unusual and even morbid strength at a time when the other mental faculties were scarcely at all unfolded.' In this connection the similar case of Chatterton need only be alluded to, but the question will be treated again in describing his later years.
Like Burns, Carlyle, and Scott, Miller seems to have borne the powerful impress, mentally and physically, of his father. Yet, like the mothers of the first two, Mrs. Miller bequeathed to her son his store of legend and story and the imagination that was thus so early awakened. The new house which his father had built remained for some little time after his death untenanted; and, as the insurance of the sloop was deferred or disputed by an insolvent broker, his mother had recourse to her needle as the means by which she could best support her family. Three children had been born, and her brothers came to her assistance and lightened her task by taking her second daughter, a child of three, to live with them. Both of the girls died of a fever within a few days of each other, the one in her twelfth, and the other in her tenth year.
Of these two uncles, the James and Sandy of his Schools and Schoolmasters, Miller has spoken with deserved affection and loyalty. To them he confesses he owed more real education than ever he acquired from all other sources; and, belonging as they do to the class of humble and worthy men that seems pre-eminently the boast and pride of Scottish life, they will merit a detailed account. Of this type some little knowledge had been made known by Lord Jeffrey in his review of Cromek's Reliques, where such men as the father of Burns and those of his immediate circle were first introduced to their proper place as those 'from whom old Scotia's grandeur springs.' In his own Reminiscences, Carlyle has added to our acquaintance with these men through his sketch of his own father and others, who are, says Professor Blackie, the natural outcome of the republican form of our Scottish Church government, and of the national system of education so early developed by Knox and the first Reformers.
The elder of the two brothers, James, was a harness-maker in steady employment in the surrounding agricultural district, so that from six in the morning till ten at night his time would be fully occupied, thus leaving him but scanty leisure. But, in the long evenings, he would fix his bench by the hearth, and listen while his nephew or his own younger brother or some neighbour would read. In the summer, he would occupy his spare hours upon his journeys to and from his rural rounds of labour in visiting every scene of legend and story far and near, and so keen were his powers of perception and ready expression in matters of a historical and antiquarian nature, that his nephew regrets he had not become a writer of books. Some part of this information, however, he has attempted to preserve in his Scenes and Legends.
To the younger brother, Alexander, he seems to have been even more indebted. If to the one he owed his gift of ready and natural expression, it was to the other that he was indebted for his powers of observation. Originally educated as a cart-wright, he had served for seven years in the navy, sailing with Nelson, witnessing the mutiny at the Nore, the battle of Camperdown under Duncan, and sharing the Egyptian campaign of Abercromby. Even on his discharge, he was still ready in 1803 to shoulder a musket as a volunteer, when Napoleon at Boulogne 'armed in our island every freeman.' The scientific interest, too, of the man may be judged from the fact that in the Egyptian expedition, during the landing, he managed to transfer a murex to his pocket from the beach, and the first ammonite which formed the nucleus of his nephew's geological collection was also brought home from an English Liassic deposit. Facts like these and the presence of such men should go far to dispel much of the cheap sentiment introduced into the current of Scottish life by writers such as Smiles and others, who profess to be ever finding some 'peasant' or 'uneducated genius' in the subjects of their all too unctuous biographies. Such a class has really no existence in Scotland, and between such men as Miller, Burns, or even the unfortunate and sorely buffeted Bethunes, there is a great gulf fixed when they are sought to be brought into relation with men like John Clare and Robert Bloomfield. All the Scotchmen, born in however originally humble circumstances, had the advantage of education at the parish school; and, slight though in some cases the result may have been, it yet for ever removes the possibility of illiteracy which the English reader at once conjures up at the sound of such surroundings. The more the critic studies the facts of Burns' early years and education, and the really remarkable stock of information with which he was to rouse the honest wonder of Dugald Stewart—his mathematical attainments and his philosophical grasp, not to mention his possession of a very powerful English prose style that makes every line of his Letters really alive and matterful—the less we shall hear of peasant genius and untaught writers. We question if one half of the members of the Edinburgh bar, such as Lockhart has described them at the arrival of Burns in Edinburgh, had reached such an amount of general and poetical literature as that easily held in command by the poet. We have heard an old schoolfellow of Edward Irving and Carlyle at the burgh school of Annan remark on the misconception of Froude as to the true social rank of their respective parents. Horace and Burns seem, as Theodore Martin has shown, not unlike in the matter of their fathers, and the possession of such sets their children far out of that circle of contracted social and moral surroundings in which the biographers of the Smiles class have too long set them.